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Nine Inch Nails Plan Four Different Covers for 'Hesitation Marks'

New album artwork was designed by Russel Mills

Nine Inch Nails' new album Hesitation Marks will feature four different covers to correlate with its various release formats. All four were designed by artist Russel Mills, who did the artwork for Nine Inch Nails' 1994 release The Downward Spiral and a handful of other NIN releases from that era.

Mills went about creating the Hesitation Marks covers with a wide array of materials, including oil and acrylic paints to earth, copper wire and rusted linen to Polaroid frames and even blood. The covers for each format also have their own titles: "Turn And Burn" (digital), "Time and Again" (standard CD), "Cargo in the Blood" (Deluxe CD) and "Other Murmurs" (vinyl). The album is due out on September 3rd.

On Nine Inch Nails' Tumblr, Mills discussed how the Hesitation Marks artwork came out of long talks with Trent Reznor and his own response to the conceptual and sonic ideas the new LP explores. Mills added that his particular penchant for, and ideas about, the intersection of the organic and natural with the industrial and man made – themes that feature heavily in his own work – fit this project especially well.

"The works explore ideas of catharsis, of being into dissolution into being, both on a personal and sociological level," Mills said. "They allude to ideas about chaos and order. They deal with ways of suggesting presence in absence. They are a cross between the forensic and a pathology of the personal in which only fragments remain, in which minimal clues can suggest events that may have occurred. They attempt to harness the chaos of a situation, of now, of the personal trauma, of the human condition, into a form that is coherent, a form that accommodates the mess without disguising it as something else. It attempts to capture the essence of these ideas by implication and exclusion. Beneath the form lies the uncertainty and ceaseless flux of the mess, of the chaos."

Mills created 30 total pieces for Hesitation Marks, which will be dispersed throughout the packaging.